What does sprintf stand for?

Question

I tried looking it up on google and wikipedia but couldn\'t find an answer... Does anyone know what \'sprintf\' or \'printf\' stands for? Is it an abbreviation for something???<

Answer 1

The various members of the printf family, derived from C where they first appeared (though they hark back to the olden days of BCPL's writef call along that particular lineage), include:

printf    - print formatted (to standard output).
fprintf   - file printf (to a file handle).
sprintf   - string printf (to a string).
snprintf  - sprintf with added overflow protection.

In addition, there are variants of those starting with v (as in vsnprintf) which can take variable arguments like printf itself.

By that I mean that they pass around a varargs argument rather than a series of arguments, allowing you to write your own printf-like function. I've used this before when developing logging libraries in the past.